Elementary Counseling

Emotional Regulation

What is it?

• The ability to effectively manage and respond to an emotional experience

Why is it important?

• To help children label emotions and identify how they are feeling

• Teach efficient coping and self-regulation strategies

• There are no ‘bad’ emotions. All emotions can be experienced at different times.   Some feelings are more comfortable or uncomfortable.

• To help children to recognize whether their emotional response is appropriate to the situation. For example, crying for one week after you drop your ice cream on the floor is not an appropriate emotional response to the situation 

What can I do?

• Talk to your child/student about;

• How they are feeling, help them to label/name the emotion

• Talk about their body cues when they feel that emotion (e.g., “You are crying. Are you sad?”)

• Discuss why they are feeling a certain way. Has anything happened?

• Talk about times when you, a family member, or a character from a film/book felt that way too.

With the color feeling zones, we often relate it to traffic signals - green good to go, yellow slow down, and red stop to use a coping skill or get help.